... is weakening and the prospects for redistributive Keynesianism appear to be dimming. In this limited sense Crewe and King are right to say the social democrats 'no longer had a programme and a theory of how the world worked'. The view from Washington Viewed from across the Atlantic this crisis within Britain was viewed with great alarm. Early in the Reagan presidency the US ambassador to Ireland, Peter Dailey, was recalled to co-ordinate both governmental and private initiatives to roll back the growing European opposition to the revived Cold War of which developments in the British Labour party and trade union movement were an important part. Documents declassified during the Congressional inquiry into the Iran Contra scandal, for ...

... - a process which was accelerated when the system, having ripped-off most of his money and destroyed his life, tossed him in prison. There he began to meet other victims, among whom are former US military and intelligence personnel who were involved in, or claim to have been involved in, the various intelligence scandals of the Reagan/Bush years: October Surprise, Inslaw, BCCI, the arming of Iran and Iraq. And so Stich begins to learn about Mossad operations; factions within the CIA; assassination squads; drug dealing on a massive scale; corrupt politicians, judges etc. etc. He lists dozens of alleged CIA operations, personnel and front companies ...

... .uk (Issue 30) December 1995 Last | Contents | Next Issue 30 Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast Jonathan Marshall 'Rug merchants' was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan's dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North's Mideast contacts. 'It was a brutal, ugly story, ' said the CIA's chief operations officer, Clair George. 'People were selling information, selling hostages, selling their rings, selling their clothes, selling letters ...

... he has been unflaggingly pushing through The Sunday Telegraph since 1993. The 'slanders' are here documented month by month. Evans-Pritchard is obviously out to unseat Clinton and, failing that, cause him as much embarassment as possible. But where was E-P and the Telegraph when we really needed them, during the scandalous years of Reagan and Bush, eh? What has Clinton done that could possibly be compared with, for example, the Savings and Loan rip-off, the biggest financial scandal in US history? NEWMAN, JOHN. Oswald and the CIA. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995. xviii+ 627 pps. Illustrated, notes (incorporating ...

... , satanically-programmed courtesans and bagmen. Bowart does not suggest that the Devil is behind this: only that the trappings of Satanism are used to terrify and indoctrinate the mind controlees during childhood. In one fascinating chapter, he interviews an anonymous woman who claims to have been mind-controlled into becoming the sex slave of Bob Hope! Reagan, Bush and other politicos are mentioned in the same context. I am willing to believe the worst about anybody, especially Bob Hope, but.... why bother? Very wealthy entertainers and politicians have wives, keep mistresses and frequent hookers. Why do they need mindless sex slaves? Tabloid readers may recall the the case ...

... KGB's overseas disinformation operations, much vaunted in the 1980s by the U.S . intelligence services, consisted of little more than a few naff projects which seem to have fooled nobody. So poor was the output of these disinformation programmes (a couple of examples are reprinted in this volume) that a tape recording in which the voices of Reagan and Thatcher had been edited together to apparently show them discussing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was attributed to the KGB. In the event the tape turned out to be the work of the now defunct rock group Crass. (This is discussed in the Observer, 22 January, 1984.) There is one unintentionally funny chapter ...

... ' (a term which came into use in the mid 1980s, as the language also followed the money). This was accompanied by the expansion of the City's cultural hegemony out from the financial pages of the non-tabloid newspapers into the mass media, as all-purpose, self-serving, 'experts' on everything. The Reagan/Thatcher period was marked by colossal, officially sanctioned rip-offs of the savings of the citizen. In the US this was done through the looting of local banks, the so-called Savings and Loans, and the use of taxes to subsidise the expanding arms industries. In Britain, the money has been made in three ...

... the developing October Surprise allegations. He reviews the evidence of the leading sources, interviewing all of them -- notably Ari Ben-Menashe -- and concludes that many (including Ben-Menashe) were lying or exaggerating in part. Despite this he concludes that the core of the story, that the in-coming Republican team round Reagan did a deal of some kind with the Iranians, is true. If the gun isn't smoking, it is still warm. Parry paints a deeply depressing picture of the corruption and sheer stupidity of the Reagan/Bush years -- and of the pressure that can be brought to bear upon a dissenting voice trying to operate within mainstream ...

... few were imported. This should have been sub-titled 'The Politics of the CIA in the 1980s'. I've read this twice, the second time to check that my initial perception that this was a very remarkable book was correct. It was. This is centrally an account of some of the bureaucratic struggles inside the CIA during the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce 'intelligence' to support their conspiracy theories about the 'communist menace'. The very idea of attempting 'the politics of the CIA', let alone getting as close as Perry has done to ...

... Now there's a surprise. Covert Action Quarterly, 1500 Massachusetts Avenue, NW #272, Washington, DC 20005, USA. A conspiracy theory boom?There does appear to be some kind of minor explosion of interest in parapolitics in the United States. And not before time. The interest in conspiracies is simply reality breaking through. The Reagan-Thatcher years saw unprecedented expansions of unregulated intelligence and military agencies, and breathtaking multi-billion rip-offs (most obviously, in the U.S ., the S and L scam; in the UK, privatisation). No one should be remotely surprised that some of the electorate -- 0.01 % maybe ...